3 posts on 11ty

WordPress has been with me since my very first post in 2009. There is a lot to love about it: It’s open source, it has a thriving ecosystem, a beautiful default theme, and a revolutionary block editor that makes my inner UX geek giddy. Plus, WP made building a website and publishing content accessible to everyone. No wonder it’s the most popular CMS in the world, by a huge margin.

However, for me, the bad had started to outweigh the good:

• Things I could do in minutes in a static site, in WP required finding a plugin or tweaking PHP code.
• It was slow and bloated.
• Getting a draft out of it and into another medium was a pain.
• Despite having never been hacked, I was terrified about it, given all the horror stories.
• I was periodically getting “Error establishing a database connection” errors, whose frequency kept increasing.

It was time to move on. It’s not you WP, it’s me.

Continue reading

This is a second spinoff post in the migration saga of this blog from WordPress to 11ty.

On good URLs

It was important to me to have good, RESTful, usable, hackable URLs. While a lot of that is easy and comes for free, following this principle with Eleventy proved quite hard:

URLs that are “hackable” to allow users to move to higher levels of the information architecture by hacking off the end of the URL

What does this mean in practice? It means it’s not enough if tags/foo/ shows all posts tagged “foo”, tags/ should also show all tags. Similarly, it’s not enough if /blog/2023/04/private-fields-considered-harmful/ links to the corresponding blog post, but also:

• /blog/2023/04/ should show all posts from April 2023
• /blog/2023/ should show all posts from 2023
• /blog/ should show all posts

Continue reading

So I recently ported my 14 year old blog from WordPress to Eleventy.

I had been using Disqus for comments for years, so I didn’t want to lose them, even if I ended up using a different solution for the future (or no comments at all).

Looking around for an existing solution did not yield many results. There’s Zach’s eleventy-import-disqus but it’s aimed at importing Disqus comments as static copies, but I wanted to have the option to continue using Disqus.

Looking at the WP generated HTML source, I noticed that Disqus was using the WP post id (a number that is not displayed in the UI) to link its threads to the posts. However, the importer I used did not preserve the post ids as metadata (filed issue #95). What to do?

Continue reading